Estimating Dietary Intake from Grocery Shopping Data—A Comparative Validation of Relevant Indicators in Switzerland

Abstract

In light of the globally increasing prevalence of diet-related chronic diseases, new scalable and non-invasive dietary monitoring techniques are urgently needed. Automatically collected digital receipts from loyalty cards hereby promise to serve as an objective and automatically traceable digital marker for individual food choice behavior and do not require users to manually log individual meal items. With the introduction of the General Data Privacy Regulation in the European Union, millions of consumers gained the right to access their shopping data in a machine-readable form, representing a historic chance to leverage shopping data for scalable monitoring of food choices. Multiple quantitative indicators for evaluating the nutritional quality of food shopping have been suggested, but so far, no comparison has validated the potential of these alternative indicators within a comparative setting. This manuscript thus represents the first study to compare the calibration capacity and to validate the discrimination potential of previously suggested food shopping quality indicators for the nutritional quality of shopped groceries, including the Food Standards Agency Nutrient Profiling System Dietary Index (FSA-NPS DI), Grocery Purchase Quality Index-2016 (GPQI), Healthy Eating Index-2015 (HEI-2015), Healthy Trolley Index (HETI) and Healthy Purchase Index (HPI), checking if any of them performs differently from the others. The hypothesis is that some food shopping quality indicators outperform the others in calibrating and discriminating individual actual dietary intake. To assess the indicators’ potentials, 89 eligible participants completed a validated food frequency questionnaire (FFQ) and donated their digital receipts from the loyalty card programs of the two leading Swiss grocery retailers, which represent 70% of the national grocery market. Compared to absolute food and nutrient intake, correlations between density-based relative food and nutrient intake and food shopping data are stronger. The FSA-NPS DI has the best calibration and discrimination performance in classifying participants’ consumption of nutrients and food groups, and seems to be a superior indicator to estimate nutritional quality of a user’s diet based on digital receipts from grocery shopping in Switzerland.

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“…First, the FSA-NPS DI has been identified as a useful and validated tool to discriminate individuals according to the quality of the diet, allowing the monitoring of dietary change [49]. Second, within a comparative study among purchase quality indicators in Switzerland, the Nutri-Score framework has been validated to estimate diet activities from shopping data better than other purchase indicators [50]. Third, when compared to other front-of-package labels, the Nutri-Score label has been validated to show superior effectiveness among consumers, especially among the at-risk population [51].…”

“…Third, when compared to other front-of-package labels, the Nutri-Score label has been validated to show superior effectiveness among consumers, especially among the at-risk population [51]. Fourth, although the Nutri-Score framework was developed for rating individual products and not aggregated shopping baskets, its scoring mechanism has been proven to correlate with overall dietary behavior when applied on grocery purchase data sets [50].…”

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“…Digital receipts from loyalty cards have a high potential as an automatic, self-updating, and scalable approach to provide automated insights into the nutrient profile of food products and development of personalized recommendations, especially in countries where loyalty card programs are widely used ( 56 – 58 ). In Switzerland, for example, the loyalty programs offered by Coop and Migros, the two main grocery stores, reach more than 3 million households each, and 80% of the retail revenues are associated to loyalty cards ( 59 , 60 ).…”

“…Examples include the Food Standards Agency Nutrient Profiling System Dietary Index (FSA-NPS DI) ( 64 ), the Healthy Trolley Index ( 65 ) or the Grocery Purchase Quality Index-2016 ( 66 ). A comparison between these food shopping quality indicators found that correlations between food shopping data and density-based relative food and nutrient intake are stronger than absolute food and nutrient intake ( 58 ). Unlike self-reported dietary intake, which assesses individual food intake, food items recorded with digital receipts are typically consumed by a whole household.…”

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“…Given the increasing prevalence of diet-related chronic diseases, in the last paper of this Special Issue, Wu et al highlighted the need for the development of new scalable dietary monitoring techniques and presented the results of a study in Switzerland in which the nutritional quality of users’ diets was estimated based on digital receipts from grocery shopping [ 20 ].…”